Search the Community

New article! Originally published on Medium for Self-Knowledge Daily. 3 Steps to Therapeutic Recovery How to take control of your life When you make the decision to start therapy, the process can be daunting. I started therapy in the spring of 2010, and I had no idea what I was doing. Since then, I’ve been struck over and over with the thought, “Am I doing this right?” I longed for a syllabus on the proper procedure and a straightforward exam at the end, like my college classes. The reality is a lot messier, and I find myself being tested over and over. (Damn you pop quizzes!) It took me a long time to figure out how to be successful in therapy. It’s only been in the last year and a half that I’ve made real progress in my therapeutic journey. And while there is no one size fits all procedure on how to discover who you are, process childhood trauma, and live your core values; I’ve sussed out three general steps that have helped guide me. 1. Cognitive Understand What Happened to You First, you put together your story, piece by piece. Tell the facts of your life to your therapist and write them down in a journal. Go over the facts again and again until you see the whole picture of who and why you are. At first it might be a bit hazy, but once you get started more and more memories will surface. Before therapy, when someone would ask me how my childhood was, an image of me running up a hill in my backyard as a kid, pretending I was Pocahontas, with the wind blowing wildly through my hair, would come to my mind. But this was the only thing I could think of in those moments. I would say some vaguely positive sentiment, but, in truth, I didn’t really know how my childhood was. When I thought about childhood, it was foggy. Like trying to do complex math in your head, the “math” of processing an old event while squaring it with old propaganda requires a lot of mental effort. Writing it out on paper and discussing it with a neutral third party will help you make sense of it. It takes going back to your history, then going back again. Each time you go back, your perception will change. This is especially important as you are learning more about yourself and gain more insights. The key here is knowing what happened to you and accepting it. The memories of my childhood were once hazy because I wasn’t seeing the reality of my history. 2. Emotional Feel Your Feelings This the hardest step. I did not want to do this step. It’s painful, but getting in touch with your emotions is crucial to the therapeutic process. I believe that this step is the key to lasting, lifelong change, not just temporary fixes. The way I was able to approach this very difficult step was going back to step one: cognitive, learning about emotions. I learned that emotions are not good or bad; they are morally neutral. It is never wrong to feel something. As John Gottman so eloquently puts it, “All feelings and wishes are acceptable, but not all behavior is acceptable.” Part of the reason emotions are morally neutral is that they are involuntary responses. We cannot control how we feel about something; we only control how we behave and what actions we take. Feelings are not dangerous. It’s safe to feel whatever you feel. After understanding emotions more, I started being more aware of when I felt things, and I wrote them down. I noticed quickly that there were some feelings I’d try run away from. When anxiety came up, for example, I immediately found something to occupy my mind or keep myself busy. This isn’t a bad tactic for the short term. Sometimes you don’t have time for a strong emotions, just like sometimes you don’t have time for a friend in crisis. But after you finish your work and take care of yourself, you call your friend to check up on her, just as I started doing with my feelings. When I do have the time, and I feel something strong coming on, I either go for a walk or lay on the couch and record an audio file. I let whatever comes up come. I let the emotion talk, sit with the feelings, and explore them. Then I listen back to what I said. I discovered that there were parts of myself who wanted a voice, and when I allowed them to speak freely and tell me what was on their minds, it was easier to work through the feelings and process them. 3. Integration How to Move Forward In this last step, you put all the work together. Through your cognitive process you understand the why and how of who you are. You know your core values and where those come from. With this knowledge you can make intentional and active choices about your future. And with the foundation you gained in emotional awareness, you can now integrate the parts of yourself. Parts of yourself can be emotions speaking up, or it could be that inner critic who always seems to have a problem with what you are doing. (My inner critic sounds eerily like my mother.) When you examine your childhood memories, that’s getting in touch with your child part. You will discover these parts in therapy, through your memories, and through self-negotiation. There may be parts of yourself that you haven’t connected with in a long time. You might be ignoring them because you don’t like what they have to say, or they make you feel anxious, or they just seem like a stranger to you. My friends don’t like it when I ignore them, and your parts don’t like it either. But when you neglect friends, you can at least get a safe distance from them. Your parts, though, are living right there with you. It might sound hippy dippy, but making friends with all the different parts of yourself, through compassion and negotiation, brings inner harmony. I’d been in therapy for a few years before I really committed to it, but when I did dedicate myself to this journey, it was a commitment to uncovering truth and taking ownership of the life I wanted to live. Self-examination can be clouded by personal biases and emotional scar tissue. The work is in knowing those parts so you can operate within objective reality. Being kind and compassionate is essential to being close to someone, and it is essential to being close with yourself. Creating standards brings consistency and security. For instance, a standard I live by is not raising my voice or using pejoratives with myself. If I do violate this rule, I don’t beat myself up, because that would further violate the standard. I take responsibility and get curious. If I call myself stupid for stubbing my toe, the name-calling is like a big stop sign in my mind to slow down and figure out what’s going on. Conclusion Through self-knowledge, emotional awareness, and integrating what you’ve learned (and unlearned!), you have skills to live a life of integrity that will bring lasting happiness. I’m still working towards this goal, but what I’ve gained so far has proven to be the happiest time in my life. Only a few years ago I was living in an inner dictatorship, but now I am starting to see an anarcho-capitalist utopia in my own mind. It’s a work in progress, of course. It takes a lot of focus, research, and practice to maintain a peaceful society up there. But the goal is to have all my parts living by consistent standards for the mutual benefit of everyone, and it’s pretty awesome.